A hypervisor escalation attack that could be run on an unpatched system strictly over port 443 is a pretty narrow scope. I guess I am not entirely confident that Hyper V on windows 10 pro will be taken as seriously by Microsoft as Hyper V on a windows server OS would be from a patch cycle standpoint but I would think it isn't wildly out of synch. That said I do have a few reasons why it might be okay for me to bend a bit on this:

#1 - This type of attack is something that for the foreseeable future would need to be specifically tailored to my environment, a script kiddy throwing in a google search and pointing a script at a result isn't going to successfully escalate something to the host from the container.

#2 - I am fairly comfortable when it comes to setting up and securing web servers, if my Hyper V container has a unique IP and my router is port forwarding only port 443 (or some other random port of choice) to that IP I am confident that I can secure the linux instance and web server (fail2ban, blacklist or whitelist ip addresses, no remote or a preshared key for root login, secured filesystem, etc).

#3 - While the high end routing and firewall equipment I am used to having in place in a data center is great, if someone compromises my home router my Windows 10 host is probably a far easier target to directly attack than attempting to go through the Linux guest VM with zero critical information on it.

I dunno maybe you are right and the risk isn't worth the gain, the wife gets annoyed when I have spare PCs stashed all over the house but maybe it would be better to just grab a high end mini PC (Intel NUC or something) and run my web server in a Hyper V on that, mount it to the back of my monitor or something.

I have a friend that uses a NUC with a SamsungPro as a home ESXi box and he says it works great. I don’t know if there are any AMD versions of that type of product but any of the micro-ITX builds people use for HTPCs should be both usable and less expensive than a NUC since intel charges a pretty hefty “tax” for the NUC.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.

That WD Blue m.2 SSD is *not* NVMe so you will be getting the same performance as a regular WD Blue 2.5" SATA SSD. If you really want to take advantage of that M.2 interface you should get an NVMe M.2 SSD.

Awesome, thanks. I think I found some good reading material on the NVMe stuff. Seems like the Samsung drives might be a better choice.

This is the 960GB version of the one I used on the build posted a couple of pages ago. Performance has been great in my experience and it seems to review well. Currently, you can get it for $180 if you use code SAVE15 at checkout.

That is a good point. I don't need a 2 TB drive, I have storage elsewhere, this is pretty much only for games. Really the only reason I even have it is for moving the occasional gigantic game that don't play for awhile or for somewhere to put raw captured video. Maybe at some point I'll grab another SSD as a secondary and re-purpose this one.

Samsung's EVO series of NVME m.2 drives is the bar to beat, and not many come close even on a dollar for dollar basis. It's just stupid fast in a way that only very high end PCIe SSD's can beat, with reliability more than high enough for home users. If nearly 2 GB/sec isn't fast enough, you're doing something way outside the normal usage pattern.

So after a bit further research it appears if you have hyper v enabled on windows 10 gaming performance takes a significant hit (30-50% loss in FPS), this is with just the service started and no Hyper V guests running.

Keep an eye on Amazon for the Black Friday week: personally, on the italian version, I just bought a Samsung 860 EVO, 1TB (already have an 850 512GB one) for just €160. Next big PC upgrade, I think I'll switch to the NVME ones.

"You may want to be careful before rushing to buy one for your gaming rig, though. While the sequential data read speeds are good for the money at 550MB/s, the write speeds are another story. AnandTech pointed out that the claimed 520MB/s sequential write speed only holds when you're using the cache. Like other high-capacity-low-price SSDs, the sustainable speeds fall significantly when you don't have the luxury of that cache, ranging from 80MB/s on the 1TB model to 160MB/s on the 2TB and 4TB editions. A discounted 860 EVO might be more competitive than the QVO. With that said, we wouldn't expect the QVO to stay at official prices forever. A drop in street prices could make this the value champ for people more interested in having a do-it-all drive than the fastest possible performance."---

I was thinking more along the lines of using it as a secondary drive with a 970 pro as my main.

edit - "160MB/s on the 2TB and 4TB editions" - this speed is roughly on par with a good mechanical drive, so if you go with a 2TB or 4TB edition it seems like it would be a good drop in replacement for any mechanical drive that would likely be in a personal computer (gaming or otherwise).

Had a bit of an adventure of the holiday break. My PC shit the bed about a week before Christmas...it had started acting wonky for a couple of weeks leading to a total failure, with random restarts, booting issues, etc. And then, yeah, it basically failed to boot at all. My first suspicion (and hope) was a PSU issue. Went out and bought a new one and swapped it in. Nope, same problems. Had already more or less ruled out RAM issues, so that meant either CPU or MB. Fuck. It had probably been 4 or 5 years since I last upgraded those bits, but I do VR gaming, so it's not like the shit was obsolete (twas an i7 4770k, I believe, so it still did the job).

So with a bit of despair (at having to drop a lot of cash) mixed with a small bit of upgrade excitement, I went about figuring out what to get. I was in an artificial rush, as I wanted the rig to be ready for when my boys came over for the holidays so they could play. That meant figuring out what the brick and mortar stores actually had on hand and adapting accordingly. I looked at Ryzen chips, but the word on the street is that the Intel stuff is still superior for gaming. If I was worried about regular pancake gaming (non VR), I would have gone that way, because it looks like a great value for the money. In the end, I decided to get the super sized taco, an i7 9700k. Also bought a (theoretically compatible, correct socket and whatnot) Z370 gaming board from MSI. Went to start my rebuild......fuck, where's my thermal paste? Disappeared in the move. Oh, and my old motherboard, it turns out, used DDR3 RAM when I was convinced in my head that it was DDR4. Oops. So went out and got some paste and some RAM the following day.

Paste is now pasted, RAM is now...rammed. Try to boot up and it goes into error. Shit. After a bunch of Benny Hilling around, swapping back the old PSU, trying diffent RAM configurations, checking the cables, plugging and unplugging fans, devices, and whatever the fuck else...still nothing. Was suspicious that the MB was in fact not actually compatible with the 9th gen i7 chips. After a bit of investigation, this turned out to be half the truth....the board was (theoritically) compatible, but possibly only after a firmware upgrade. Which I obviously couldn't perform, because I couldn't boot the machine. Fuck. by now it is holiday time and everything is closed, so that was an expensive and epic failure.

Fast forward a few days later, and I went and traded the MB for a truly compatible 9th gen board, probably the only one in all of Scandinavia. Was still nervous, because I didn't actually know for certain that the board was the issue. Well, it was. I want to say that it then booted up no problem, but then Windows 10 became the issue, in spite of most articles out there saying that Win 10 only requires a straight forward repair after a MB/CPU upgrade. Nope. Had to do a full wipe and re-install, which was annoying for several reasons, not least of which because I now no longer have a legit copy of Windows

At the end of the day, 1200 bucks later or so, it works. I wish I could say that the new setup is noticeably quicker, but I can't tell any difference thus far, which might just mean that none of the shit I am currently playing is CPU limited. But whatever, it works and is ready for the future. All I need now is to drop another 1000 on a new card, because the 1080 is probably the bottleneck now. Oh, and I fucked up the SATA connection on my old spinner drive, so I can add that to the list of things that need to be replaced. It kinda blows spending this kind of money on a machine that basically performs at the same level as before.

Never, ever assume someone that short and fat has their shit together. - Schild

I am a rank amateur at the self-build stuff, in that I am not a real expert by any stretch but am generally just good at figuring things out. Which means a lot of mistakes get made along the way, due to things I did not know or simply have forgotten. I only do this every 3 or 4 years if I can avoid it. I learn from the pain. On the plus side, I get hugely up to speed on the current generation of stuff. Doing VR means you need to know how to get the most out of your shit. On the downside, it makes you look at your crusty old GTX1080 card and wish it was faster, when most people would love to have that card. It gets expensive.

Never, ever assume someone that short and fat has their shit together. - Schild

One factor in my putting off a tv upgrade (I was close to getting a 75" Sammy QLED): my 970 is good for 1080p gaming. So I'd need to look at a gpu upgrade, too.

Though after playing GTA V on the PS4 Pro and going back to the PC version when I was running some tests...the 970 is sluggish on ultra settings. Never really noticed until I got the damned console :D

Oh, and for future thought: if you have a phone with a memory card slot, you could've grabbed the bios flash from the cell network and put the card in a larger housing into the pc.

In this case, the MB was only days old, so it was way easier and far less risky to just do a refund and drop another 15 bucks on the proper board. But curious how that would even work....never had to flash an MB before.

Never, ever assume someone that short and fat has their shit together. - Schild

Any expectations of major changes in the 1060/1070 notebook range? I'm finally being forced into a new computer after putting it off so long. I'm leaning towards a Alienware m15 build, they sound solid and just shy of $2k after tax with 1070 MaxQ. No Gsync, but I'm not a FPS gamer anymore. I like the idea of buying from Dell because I can build it with Windows 10 Pro instead of buying something off Newegg and paying to upgrade later.

I really like how solid Razer 15" are in person, the metal casing feels great. I'm hoping the Alienware m15 is similar.

Thanks Trippy. The Alienware is coming in around $2k after tax and the best I can see out of that batch is the MSI GS65 Stealth at $2k before tax. With taxes around 10.1% here, I think I'm going to stick with the Dell/Alienware.

The MSI GS 65 Stealth is very nice though, similar specs and looks a lot less like a gaming notebook. Hmmm. Decisions. The MSI also has a 144Hz monitor which looks like a nice step up from the Dell.

I'd like to get briefly back to the earlier discussion you guys were having on SSDs. As mentioned in my longer post above (at the very end), I fucked up my spinner drive. Or at least, the SATA connector. Assuming I cannot fix it (I already made an attempt with duct tape believe it or not, but the drive sits in a position that puts too much strain on the angle of the connection so it still pops loose too easily and loses connection), I need to find a solution. For reference, I have an 256gb Evo (840 I think) which is used for the OS and for a couple of what I consider the higher priority games that I didn't want on the spinner.

The second drive is used mainly to store shit and occasionally play video files from, but I put lower priority games on it as well. I have a hard time talking myself into simply buying another spinner, even though that would do the job for the most part. In part, this is because the 256gb on the main drive is proving to be less adequate all the time as games get bigger and I want more of them installed concurrently.

So I am kicking around just getting another SSD as the second drive. Because the price differences are what they are, I am looking for input on the argument between the traditional SATA SSDs (M.2 interface or traditional) versus the true PCI 3.0 (NVMe or whatever). In theory, it could be assumed that whatever I get would be at least a small upgrade to the Evo 840 I have and would eventually have the OS sitting on it.

So the question is then: For the different applications, whether that be running the OS or for gaming, what kind of real world difference is there between the old SATA version and the new shit? I understand the theoretical speed differences, but want a bit more anecdotal information on how you experience it in the real world.

Never, ever assume someone that short and fat has their shit together. - Schild

According the interwebs NVMe is faster but not in a way that is likely to be noticeable when gaming. But if price per GB is in the same ballpark I would go that route. Not sure what your secondary drive storage requirements are or what your budget is. That said the Samsung QVO I linked to earlier doesn't seem to have the 2tb/4tb models available for purchase yet and considering the costs of EVO drives not sure why anyone would consider the QVO 1tb version. You can get a 2TB version of the Samsung Evo for under $400 or go with a 4tb Samsung pro for just under 1k (traditional form factor SATA 3). For myself I'm holding out for a sub $500 4tb Samsung (even if it is a QVO) to replace my secondary drives, with a Samsung Pro series NVMe (currently using a 512gb) as a primary.

That's correct. For almost all games their load times are not bottlenecked by the SATA bus. PCIe SSDs may in some cases offer slightly better load times but that would be the exception rather than the rule. There are even some SATA SSDs that have better load times than some PCIe SSDs because of controller and memory chip differences. The same applies to OS boot times.

The Tech Report does a few benchmarks when they test SSDs which show the real-world performance improvements, or lack thereof, of PCIe SSDs vs SATA SSDs. Unfortunately their graphs are extremely hard to read if you are trying to do this sort of comparison because they don't differentiate between the interface types so you basically have to memorize which drives use which interface. For example: